Talk:Ascend

Dice Wonkery

This is to get a feel for how big the decision space of a given set of dice is.

2D10: 19 possibilities total, 15 certain possibilities (95%), 9 likely possibilities (75%), 5 maybe possibilities (50%)

3D10: 28 possibilities total, 20 certain possibilities, 12 likely possibilities, 8 maybe possibilities

Attack and Damage Types

Attacks are what defense you roll again. A ninja monk who's trained for a thousand years might have a very high melee defense but would find it difficult to parry a bullet.

• Melee: What it says on the tin. Fists, swords, sword-chucks, lightning grasp, etc.
• Ranged: Attacks from range; guns, lasers, fireballs.
• Etheric: Attacks that are not 'aimed' conventionally and can be misdirected or adversely affected by active countermeasures. This covers not only many spells, but guided 'smart' weapons as well.
• Mental: A non-physical attack that strikes towards the spark of thought. This covers all manner of illusion and mental attacks, but also covers electronic hacking.

Damage types are instead the physical (or non-physical, as the case may be) effects of the attack and are what thresholds/special rules are applied.

• Physical: The simple impact of 'things' on other 'things'; daggars, bullets, flung icicles
• Energy: An attack/effect that works primarily via energy (electromagnetic or more exotic); lightsabers, plasma cannons, lightning bolts
• Pattern: That which affects the fundamental nature of a target; polymorph spells, disintigrations, nanotechology
• Psionic: An attack against the mind or other thinking things; mental domination, ghost hacking, unnatural deception.

Taking Damage

Silhouette (Heavy Gear) uses a broadly similar system of damage inflicted vs thresholds to inflict Light, Heavy or Instant Death. Heavy is at x2 and Death is at x3.

Presumably we would instead use the dice roll vs ascending threshholds for a similar effect, though I would have the threshholds be more variable.

Weapon Damage

• Melee weapons should have the lowest variability and highest flat bonuses, including presumably physique bonuses. (ie, 1D10 + 10)
• Ranged weapons should have medium variability and a decent bell curve. (ie, 3D10)
• Explosives and other AOEs should (normally) have the highest variability and be the 'chanciest'. (ie, 1D10 x3) - Much more likely to hit for massive damage, but also much more likely to whiff.

Scaling

Scaling applies a multiplier to damage done and applies to-hit modifiers. Multipliers apply to all effects such as armor, AP, etc. Scaling exists to keep the rolls and numbers fairly easy when acting within the same scale (such as giant robot brawls) All values up for discussion.

• Character Scale: Unchanged
• Hardsuit Scale: Elementals, hardsuits, space marine terminators, microtanks, etc. x2 damage multiplier, -2 to hit. Counts as 'x2.5' when dealing with larger scales.
• Vehicle Scale: Most vehicles. x5 damage multipler, -4 to hit
• Battle Scale: Heavy AFVs such as tanks, mobile suits, etc. x25 damage multiplier, -8 to hit.
• Fleet Scale: (War)ships and superheavy ground units - MGFs, super arty, etc. x100 damage multiplier, -12 to hit

The utility of Fleet Scale may be questionable; I think we should simply run all that at Battle Scale and inflate the dice/hits for large weapons/units as appropriate, but I'm putting it here for completeness. Likewise, Hardsuit scale may be superfluous.